RSS Feeds
|
US Edition
Babblebaby
|
Defamer
|
Gizmodo
|
Kotaku
|
Lifehacker
International lifehackers, unite! Dutch speakers, our life hacking friends in the Netherlands have released an ebook compilation of their best posts and are offering it as a free download here. Nice work, lifehacking.nl!
Windows only: Free thumb drive utility Portable Start Menu is a handy, multi-function tool for anyone who uses a USB drive to launch portable applications. The program can search out and find any self-running .exe file on a thumb drive and add it to a start menu that sits in the Windows system tray while the USB drive is plugged in. The app also has a "Quick Start" function that you can access with a shortcut to launch any program, and Portable Start Menu can create its own AutoRun file to have it launch once it's plugged in. Portable Start Menu is a free download for Windows systems only.
Veteran Lifehacker reader Scott writes in with a tip for anyone who regularly renames groups of pictures, documents, or other files, but doesn't need a bulk renaming utility to get it done. Just start renaming the first file in a folder or list (by hitting F2, right-clicking or "long clicking" on the name), but instead of hitting enter or clicking to finish, hit "Tab," and Vista will instantly head over to the next file for renaming. XP users don't have this ability, but they can get Vista's ability to select just the file name for renaming. Thanks, Scott!
Photoshop enthusiast and frantic video editor Deke McClelland fits 101 tips for Adobe's premiere product into five minutes of video, and the results are surprisingly watchable. Granted, a lot of the tips are simply shortcuts you may or may not have discovered, but McClelland fits a good bit of real advice—such as which tools to just stay away from entirely—into his frantic run. Worth a listen to catch shortcuts you might not have known, and real advice from a serious Photoshop enthusiast.
Editor: We asked Mark Hurst, author of the book Bit Literacy (our review) and developer of the web-based task manager Gootodo, to tell us why he built Gootodo and how it fits into what he calls "bit literacy." Here's what he said.
Posted by Angus Kidman at 2:55 PM on June 25, 2008
eBay Australia is holding one of its periodic discounted sales, not charging insertion fees for listings under $9.99 between June 26 and June 29. (Regular insertion fees for that kind of price range between 30 cents and 50 cents.)
Now, whether this is a standard end of financial year sale or an attempt to boost traffic in the face of everyone getting annoyed by its klutzy handling of the compulsory PayPal debacle is open to speculation. But we will point out that any auction listed during this period will be allowed to accept a range of payment methods, so it could be a good chance to offload that heap of semi-usable stuff you've been meaning to get rid of and save a little into the bargain.
Posted by Angus Kidman at 2:30 PM on June 25, 2008
On a recent trip to Perth, a constant topic amongst everyone I met was the difficulty in getting staff to do basic entry-level jobs in the face of demand from remote mining sites. As one bloke put it to me: "I can't get someone to work for me for $60,000 when they can get $100,000 to wash dishes at the mines."
It seems Queensland is suffering from a similar problem, with reports that McDonald's and KFC franchises in Mt Isa and Mackay are having to look overseas for managers . It doesn't seem that this is the kind of "kids don't want to work" story so beloved of tabloids, since those locations are still hiring teenagers; instead it's the simple fact that rapidly growing remote locations have trouble getting the employees they need to manage the stores. Is there any solution to this apart from importing workers -- or shutting fast food restaurants? Could a Maccas be managed remotely? Let us know your thoughts in the comments. (McDonald's pic from PR Newswire. We don't imagine Justin Timberlake is actually available for any of these vacancies.)
Fast food shops recruit foreign workers [The Australian]
Posted by Angus Kidman at 2:17 PM on June 25, 2008
Steve Ruiz wanted to be able to enter URLs or searches into Firefox on his Mac and have them open in a new tab simply by hitting Command-Enter (Option-Enter is the default). With no obvious solution in site, he wrote a simple extension to accomplish the task, which you can download from his site. For more Mac Firefox keyboard tweaking, remember you can also ensure that the Home and End keys work like Windows.
Firefox 3 - Opening a URL in new tab using command-enter [Ruizs Place]
Posted by Angus Kidman at 1:17 PM on June 25, 2008
If public humiliation via Twitter isn't your preferred weight loss strategy, how about gaming? Blogger Mickey DeLorenzo lost 6.8kg in simply 41 days by adding regular use of the Wii Fit to his daily routine. This isn't exactly surprising -- any conscious increase in physical activity should peel off some of the pork -- but it might be more appealing than taking up jogging in mid-winter.
The Official Wii Fit Experiment
Posted by Angus Kidman at 8:24 AM on June 25, 2008
With the recent launch of the Foxtel IQ2, the imminent (and much-delayed) appearance of Tivo in Australia next month, and Sony promising its own PlayTV personal video recorder (PVR) option before the year is out, there are more big-name PVR choices for Aussies than ever before. Getting your favourite TV programs automatically recorded for playback at a time that suits you is an obviously appealing concept, but despite the arrival of these new entrants, you still have two basic choices: a fairly pricey system that works well but is hard to customise, or a much cheaper and more flexible option that may not deliver on the simplicity and reliability front.
If you're running Windows apps on your Mac with VMware Fusion in Unity mode< but you're sick of blurry icons in your Dock and application switcher, the VMware Fusion blog has a simple solution: Replace your blurry Windows icons with high-resolution ones. Many of your Windows icons max out at 28x28 pixels, which is why you see the blur when they're on display next to your Mac's at least 128x128-pixel icons. The post highlights a few high resolution Windows icon packs for the job, and then details how to make the switch. As a bonus, the high-res icons work equally well if you just want to spice up your regular Windows install.
Dear Lifehacker,
As we all know, the absolute greatest thing about Firefox is its extensibility, so why is it that the Firefox Add-ons window seems to be the only thing I can't get to with a keyboard shortcut? Now that the Add-ons window has the Get Add-ons tab in Firefox 3, there's even more reason I want to be able to get there quickly. How can I create my own keyboard shortcut to my Firefox extensions?
Signed,
Shortcut Junkie
Mac only (Windows version on its way): Personal time tracking software Slife gets a redesign and some sleek new features in its newest version 2.0. Slife tracks and charts what applications and documents you use and for how long throughout the day. Categorise that time into activities and goals—like "Reading email," "Online research," or "Designing web pages"—so you can see exactly where it is your day went. Version 2.0 for Mac offers a slicker design, goal tracking, better visualisations, Growl support—and no pricetag. Slife 2.0 is a free download for Mac only, but a Windows version 2.0 is on its way. Here's more on the Windows beta.
If you've got an overstuffed inbox and you want to declare Inbox Zero without individually marking messages as read, you can mark all unread mail as read using a Gmail filter. Create a new filter with is:unread in the Has the words field, then tell Gmail to Mark as read all matching messages. Finally, tick the box next to Also apply filter to conversations below and create the filter. The filter will mark all your unread items as read. If you just want to clear out unread items in a specific label, add something like label:Followup to the Has the words box with is:unread. Simple, quick, and you don't have to page through thousands of emails to get the job done. Just be sure to delete the filter when you're done. UPDATE: As bostonguy points out, Gmail has added an option in search results to select all conversations that match a search, which makes the filter unnecessary. See the screenshot after the jump.
Now that you've minimised Firefox's chrome with a few good user styles, it's time to maximize your surfing area. Just by moving a few small things around you can have all of Firefox's menu and location bar's features, but without all the real estate-hogging. Check out a video screencast of how to consolidate Firefox's chrome after the jump.
For jailbroken iPhones: For some reason or another, the mobile Safari browser on some updated iPhones and iPod touch models seems to constantly drop cookies, making iPhone-friendly sites like Google Reader and Remember the Milk a lot less useful. iRemember, a free one-fix app, makes a simple change in the Unix-y guts of your phone to help Safari hold onto its cookies better. Installing the app requires adding a repository to your Installer sources, but the fix seemed to work in a quick test, at least on Google sites. iRemember is a free download for jailbroken iPhones and iPod touches.
Web-based album art library and search engine AllCDCovers just may have the missing art you've been looking to fill in your digital music collection. Despite its name, AllCDCovers carries both album art, DVD covers, and game covers, front and back, with pretty high res versions available for free download. AllCDCovers didn't have the indie artist I tried, so the really obscure stuff might not be here; still, when the iTunes Store fails you it may be a good stop. Share your favourite online source of downloadable album art in the comments.
Windows/Mac/Linux (Firefox): Open It Online, a free Firefox extension, cuts out all the middle steps between finding a document in a Google search, in your web mail, or anywhere else online, and getting it open in a web-based office/editing suite. In other words, it adds an option to your Firefox "Open With" dialog to let you open Word documents, spreadsheets, PDFs, and more file types in Google Docs, the Zoho suite, ThinkFree Viewer, and other locations. You can pre-set defaults for every file type, and that's just about it—nice and convenient for fans of online editing. Open It Online is a free download, works wherever Firefox 2 or 3 does.
